


just perfect little satellites

by superstarrgirl



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Michelle Jones Wants Friends, another Finding Out fic, author's attempt at humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 14:07:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13215369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superstarrgirl/pseuds/superstarrgirl
Summary: Two days later and she’s staring at him in decathlon practice like some love-drunk teenager and feels, for the briefest of moments, like there has been some grand cosmic shift that no one felt the need to tell her about it.--or--MJ finds out, not just about the Big Secret, but about so much more - namely, that Peter Parker might be the death of her, Spider-Man and all.





	just perfect little satellites

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there! I honestly didn't think I would ever write anything for Spider-Man but I've been on a bit of a kick recently and this just kinda spilled! I am also thinking of maybe turning it into a series, but that's a possibility only. Hope you guys enjoy!!
> 
> ps. the title comes from sara bareilles' 'satellite call'

She knows by about two weeks in.

Later, she’ll dismiss it by saying that he wasn’t really subtle about it – he’d always come stumbling into class twenty minutes late, sometimes with dirt on his face and scabbed knuckles and almost immediately after Spider-Man had just saved the day in some borough of Manhattan. She’s sitting right behind him and Ned when they’re forced to watch that dumb Captain America fitness challenge, and the dumbass literally says, for the class and God to hear, “I stole his shield.” He’s mysteriously MIA in DC, but Spider-Man just happens to show up when the decathlon team gets stuck at the George Washington Monument even though, prior to this, Spider-Man is strictly Manhattan based. At the same time Peter loses the Stark Internship, Spider-Man gets a Staten Island Ferry torn in half by a guy with bird wings and, according to reports, gets a real talking down from Iron Man.

MJ doesn’t miss a beat, and Peter Parker being Spider-Man? Not something she can really miss.

\--

Her foray into the world of friends starts off with Ned Leeds. He’s sitting alone at the lunch table one day, looking terribly forlorn and entirely lost without his right-hand-man. MJ fiddles with the binding of her book – _The Bell Jar_ , by Sylvia Plath – and then drops down in front of Leeds.

He jumps about a foot in the air, his jaw hanging open as he stares at her. “What?” She asks through a mouthful of PB&J. “Do I have something on my face?”

It takes him a very long time to realize that she’s spoken, and even longer to formulate a response. “Uh,” He finally says. “No, I just. You’ve never sat with us before.”

MJ quirks an eyebrow and swallows her bite of sandwich. “Well, you looked a little lost without your partner in crime.” And then she flips open her book and sets to reading. When she looks up at Ned, she watches something very strange flit across his face before he realizes she’s looking at him, and then he shovels a forkful of tuna salad into his mouth and says nothing for the rest of lunch.

When Peter is there the next day, looking like he hasn’t slept in days but still delving into a very heated debate with Ned about the continuity errors in the newest _Star Wars_ , MJ attempts to slide past them and sit down her end of the table, like usual.

Until Ned says, loud enough for the whole freaking school to hear, “aren’t you gonna sit with us?”

MJ freezes, feeling a little bit like a kid stuck with her hand inside the cookie jar, like she’s been borrowing something and has snapped it in half. She almost says, _you’ve got your Peter back; it was a one-time thing_. She almost says, _we’re not friends you dweeb_. She almost says, _you don’t have to pity me because I have no friends_.

But then she sees their faces, sees Ned’s sincerity and Peter’s blatant confusion and, underneath it all, a tinge of excitement at the prospect that MJ might sit with them. There are a lot of thoughts that cross her mind, but the one that comes out is, “didn’t wanna interrupt your nerd-bonding.”

She sits down, right in front of Peter, and notices a bruise on his collarbone that hadn’t been there the day before.

\--

How it happens is still a little fuzzy in her brain, but she starts going over to Peter’s apartment nearly every Friday.

Ned is there too, because rarely is there one without the other. But it’s become tradition now – they catch the train from Midtown to Queens, buy some snacks and provisions at the bodega down the street from his apartment, and then spend the afternoon and evening binge-watching movies and chowing down on tortilla chips and the fancy white cheddar popcorn that Mrs. Parker buys. Every Friday is a new take-out restaurant; it’s sometimes Thai, sometimes Italian, sometimes Indian or Chinese or Mexican.

The boys force her to watch all the _Star Wars_ movies, and then _Lord of the Rings_ , and she returns the favor by forcing them to watch, and consequently love, both seasons of _Stranger Things_. For three hours after they finish the second season, Ned keeps trying to move shit with his mind, focusing hard enough that MJ kind of worries he will actually give himself a nosebleed.

By the third week in, she makes the decision – Michelle Jones has friends.

\--

If murder were legal, Peter Parker would be dead six times over.

“Where is he?” MJ demands of Ned, who pales and shakes his head. Decathlon practice started 45 minutes ago, and the shitweed still isn’t here, isn’t answering any texts, and sends any phone calls straight to voicemail. Flash is starting up another round of ‘Penis Parker’, and MJ typically isn’t a violent girl, but murder is looking like a very solid option right now.

After another ten minutes of listening to Ned jabber on the phone to Peter’s voicemail, Mr. Harrington finally sighs, “I guess we’d better get started.”

MJ grinds her teeth in agitation, glancing at Ned. “He better be dead in a ditch somewhere.” She warns, not really meaning anything by it. But Ned pales and looks towards the door, then back to his phone, and then up at her. 

Oh. Right. She forgot about the whole crime-fighting spider thing. Oops.

They’re about twenty minutes into practice, and Michelle is arguing with Flash about something inanely stupid and something she really doesn’t care about, but it’s Flash, so. Ned’s fiddling with his phone, and jumps about a foot in the air when the thing goes off in his hand. He fumbles at it, glances at the caller ID, and hurries to accept the call.

“Peter?” He gasps out, and then he stumbles out of his chair, off the podium, and into the hallway. The team watches him go, and Michelle has just enough brain capacity to yell, “tell your twin that his ass is grass!”

“Michelle.” Mr. Harrington deadpans without looking up from his Candy Crush game.

Ned doesn’t come back to decathlon practice, but once they’re dismissed, MJ marches her ass to the train station and then to Peter’s apartment building. At his door, she slams an open fist on it and shouts, “Parker you better open this door right fuckin’ now or I swear to _God_ -!”

The door swings open, and MJ shuts up.

The best description that she can come up with for it is that he looks like he got mauled by a bear.

There are bruises purpling along his jaw and around both eyes, and the few inches of skin she can see above his t-shirt are streaked in dried dirt and blood. He’s favoring his left leg and resting most of his body weight on the door handle. He’s gritting his teeth, evidently in pain, and she can see blood caught on his tongue and incisors. 

In her mind, she had a whole big speech prepared – I thought we talked about this, you promised you wouldn’t skip decathlon practice, the team is a lot bigger than just _you_ , Peter Benjamin Parker – but instead all that comes out is, “holy shit you look like you got run over by the A train.”

Peter spits out a weak laugh, and then grimaces. “Something like that.” He mumbles, stepping aside so she can come in. “Just…lost a fight with some bullies.” He shuts the door and she watches, fascinated, as he limps slowly over to the couch and lowers himself down.

“Bullies.” MJ repeats, trying to keep the accusatory edge out of her voice. She mustn’t do that great of a job, because his head snaps up and he narrows his eyes at her, surveying her like he’s just caught her in some grand lie. 

“Yeah, bullies.” He finally says, a little sharper than the moment calls for. He realizes, because he clears his throat and says, a little softer: “some big dumb bullies.”

“Big dumb bullies.” She agrees, and then stumbles into the kitchen to make him some tea because she doesn’t really know what else to do.

As the water boils, she wonders if there’s a part of her that should be a little upset that Peter still hasn’t told her the Big Secret **™** , because they’ve been friends for however long and Leeds obviously knows so why doesn’t she? Does Peter not trust her enough to tell her? Does he not care about their friendship enough?

Is he…is he embarrassed by her?

“Michelle, the water is boiling.”

Without realizing, Peter has snuck up on her, and she near about jumps through the roof when he says her name and she realizes he’s literally right next to her.

She pours the water into the cup and is eternally grateful that Peter doesn’t point out that her hands are shaking.

In the end, they wind up curled on the couch, a bowl of popcorn balanced between them and a bag of peas held to Peter’s face and a rerun of Fixer Upper on. MJ asks where May is, and Peter says, “she went upstate for something,” and that’s the end of the conversation. They don’t talk about the bruises, and they don’t talk about the secret, and they don’t talk about the fact that their feet are pressed together under the blanket.

On the walk back to her apartment, she realizes that this was the first time that she’s been alone with Peter, without Ned or Liz or May. And she realizes how normal it was – how he told her jokes and mimicked the people on the screen and said that one day he was going to buy a piece of land in the middle of Nowhere, New York, and just have at it. And she had stolen sips of tea out of his mug and promised to never, _ever_ , leave New York. And she realizes, as she unlocks her door, how much he had made her laugh, to the point of tears.

In her bathroom, she stares at herself in the mirror – at her piles of brown curls and her sharp cheekbones and jawline and the angular jut of her shoulder blades and collarbones. She stares at the curve of her lips and the flicker of her eyes.

“You don’t have a crush on Peter Parker.” She tells herself sternly, and even her own reflection seems to be laughing at her.

She kind of wants to cry.

\--

Two days later and she’s staring at him in decathlon practice like some love-drunk teenager and feels, for the briefest of moments, like there has been some grand cosmic shift that no one felt the need to tell her about it.

\--

Ned goes on vacation to Florida and Peter invites her over to watch shitty movies and instead they end up lying top-to-tail on his bedroom floor, as the lights of New York City get dim outside his window.

“Do you ever think,” he starts. “Do you ever think about the different paths you’ve chosen to lead you to this spot?”

MJ struggles into a sitting position, resting her weight on the palms of her hands. “What are you talking about?”

He does the same, and his thigh brushes against hers and it’s such a casual, friendly, _normal_ thing but this brand new tectonic shift makes her skin shiver in goosebumps. “Like, okay.” He tries again, running a hand through his hair in agitation. “Our lives are made up of different paths, right? And each decision, each choice, changes our course. So, if my parents hadn’t died when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have moved in with Aunt May and Uncle Ben. If I hadn’t have moved in with Aunt May and Uncle Ben, I probably would have lived outside the city my whole life. If I had have lived outside the city my whole life, I wouldn’t have gone to Midtown. So, this one event in my childhood changed the entire course of my life, right?”

“Well, yeah.” MJ says. “But that’s kinda the whole thing. That your life isn’t perfectly mapped out – that every choice you make changes something down the road. Like, if the Avengers had never formed and the Battle for New York had never happened, Mr. Toomes wouldn’t have had to become a weaponry dealer and wouldn’t have needed his own villain story and Liz wouldn’t have had to move away. And the Spider-Man probably wouldn’t have ever needed to fight crime on the night of his Homecoming." 

Peter goes very, very still.

Later MJ thinks that she could have played it off – could have said that it was just the first thing that came to mind, that she watched the Toomes trial and took arduous notes and researched it, digging into files all the way from 2012 about Tony Stark’s intervening hand and the recent crop-up of a masked vigilante in a red spandex suit. Later she thinks that she could have just said that she knew Peter would understand what she was talking about because of his relationship with Liz.

But Peter goes very still, and then says, “How long have you known?” and barely stops himself from flinching when MJ says, “about six months.”

She’s expecting anger, or resentment, or confusion, because she knows that’s how she would react in that situation. What she’s not expecting is for Peter to sag back against the bed, rub a hand across his face and mumble, “shit, now I owe Ned ten bucks.”

\--

“You assholes were _betting_ on how long it would take me to realize that you were _Spider-Man_?!”

“In my defence, Ned only figured it out because he literally saw me crawl onto the ceiling!”

“That’s not a defence, Parker, that’s a shitty ass excuse.”

“Hey, this isn’t just on me! You could’ve said something!”

“Oh, and what was I gonna say? ‘By the way Peter, just wanted to let you know that I worked out you’re the Spider-Man that’s running around Manhattan because you have the subtlety of a nuclear fucking _bomb_ ’?”

“…Fair point.”

\--

Ned gets back and Peter slams a $10 bill in front of him in the cafeteria.

Ned looks at the bill, looks up at Peter, looks to Michelle, looks back at the money, and then grins. “I told you she worked it out.” He says smugly, and Peter grimaces something about shitty friends while Michelle smirks and snatches his saltine crackers from his bag.

As Peter and Ned start to bicker, MJ finds herself getting distracted by the curl to Peter’s hair, the way his eyes seem to glisten in the bright cafeteria lighting. Her chest constricts at the thought that he’s been swinging through the streets of New York, fighting crime and running the risk of dying and all because he’s too goddamn stubborn to leave the protecting to the heroes.

But then again, a very small part of her whispers, maybe he’s just as much a hero as any of them. 

Peter manages to drag his attention away from Ned long enough to smile at MJ, and it feels for the briefest of moments like the whole world has dropped away and it’s just the two of them. Like there’s no Ned and there’s no buzzing cafeteria and there’s no weight of Manhattan resting on a 16 year old’s shoulders.

MJ smiles back and allows herself a heartbeat to think, _maybe having friends isn’t too bad._

\--

Two weeks later and Peter catches himself staring at MJ in practice – at the delicate curve of her wrists and the way she ties her hair up with a pencil and the Midtown sweatshirt that’s three sizes too big and the angle of her cheekbones and the way her dark eyes seem to melt like chocolate in the filtered sunlight – and can’t help but think that he’s _way_ out of his league with this one.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> it is also my own personal headcanon that when Aunt May is "upstate" after Peter gets banged up, she's actually upstate yelling at Tony Stark because that is absolutely something I need in the next movie pls and thank you


End file.
